Apple just became the first U.S. company to achieve a $1 trillion valuation, which seems rather unfathomable at first. “For $1 million you could buy a very nice one bedroom apartment in San Francisco. With $1 trillion, you could buy a very nice apartment for everybody in the city (San Francisco’s population is close to a million).” But hopefully Apple will “write a check because there’s just over a trillion dollars currently in circulation in the U.S.”

“The world’s most valuable public company just made more history.” Shares in Apple “rose 0.8% Wednesday to close at a new all-time high of $176.24, giving the iPhone maker a market value of $904.9 billion.” The advance makes Apple “the first U.S. company to reach the $900 billion threshold, having already become the first to hit $800 billion.”

“A report published last year stated that more than 37 percent of workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born.” Not surprisingly, given that, “a group of nearly 100 tech companies have filed an amicus brief to a federal appeals court voicing concerns over President Donald Trump’s stalled immigration-focused executive order.” Among them were “Google, Apple, GoPro, Facebook, Dropbox, eBay, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix and Twitter.”

“An epic struggle looms. It will transform daily life as profoundly as cars did in the 20th century: reinventing transport and reshaping cities, while also dramatically reducing road deaths and pollution.” Across several industries companies have grasped “the transformative potential of electric, self-driving cars, summoned on demand.” With Uber poised to lead this race, “technology firms including Apple, Google and Tesla are investing heavily in autonomous vehicles; from Ford to Volvo, incumbent carmakers are racing to catch up.”

“The European Commission’s decision to impose a tax bill of 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) on Apple is unjust and unnecessary. And the harm is not confined to a single company: The ruling has cast a cloud of uncertainty over Europe’s corporate-tax rules, potentially affecting all multinational investors.”

With about 1,000 companies making smartphones globally, only “one reaps nearly all the profits” and that company accounts for just 20% of smartphone unit sales. “Apple Inc. recorded 92% of the total operating income from the world’s eight top smartphone makers in the first quarter, up from 65% a year earlier.”

EU policy makers’ now have their “sights have fixed upon ‘Gafa’ — the acronym used to denote Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.” The regulators do not hate technology. “They understand that digital services invigorate the economy. But…. Europe has recently felt itself to be more on the losing side; however measured, not one of the world’s largest internet companies is European.”

“Having attacked everything else, Apple is going after the last screen left. But where’s the big innovation?” This missing element may explain the “subdued” reaction greeting Apple’s roll out of the iWatch.

“Instead of changing a structure of employment that clearly does not work for women, Apple and Facebook are offering employees the chance to freeze their eggs and have children later.” Egg freezing and storage is the latest Silicon Valley perk designed “to attract more female employees” and “tackle the Gender Pay Gap.” But to some, this sounds surreal. “Women freeze the source of life itself? That’s not a perk, it’s an outrage.”

“Nine of the world’s ten most valuable firms are American.” A rising stock market and the euro crisis are partly responsible, but the reasons go deeper. “First, America’s mix of resilience and renewal. Three of its nine biggest firms have their roots in a 16-year period in the late 19th century—Exxon, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Their durability reflects their powerful corporate cultures. But the country still does creative destruction, too. IBM and Intel have slid down the rankings to be replaced by Apple and Google. Chevron, an energy firm, has gone from a laggard to a world-beater. Success has been anything but parochial. Six of the nine biggest firms sell more abroad than at home.”